IMMIGRATION: Guatemalans flocking to Inland area

Milvia and Amilcar Mancilla have lived in the Riverside area for 31 years but it was the late 1980s before they met another Guatemalan immigrant in the city.

Since then, the Guatemalan population has exploded in Riverside and throughout the Inland area. The region now ranks eighth among U.S. metropolitan areas in the number of residents of Guatemalan ancestry.

The surging Guatemalan presence is part of the diversification of the Inland area’s Latin American population.

The region’s Latino residents are still overwhelmingly Mexican in ancestry, but the percentage of Guatemalans, Salvadorans and other non-Mexican Latin Americans is increasing much more rapidly.

The number of residents of Guatemalan background in Riverside and San Bernardino counties increased 242 percent between 2000 and 2010, to 28,726, according to the 2010 U.S. census. The Mexican-ancestry population rose 72 percent, to more than 1.7 million.

More than two-thirds of Inland residents of Guatemalan ancestry are immigrants, U.S. census estimates show.

Many Inland Guatemalans said they were attracted to the region by the boom in construction work during the early and mid 2000s.

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Marcos Velasquez arrived in Lake Elsinore in 2001 from Guatemala after his father — who immigrated in 1999 — told him about construction jobs in the area. Velasquez, 26, is still a construction worker and has struggled to pay bills since the housing market crashed.

“Life is very hard,” he said in Spanish.

“But I’m here for my kids,” said Velasquez, who earned a pittance picking coffee and tobacco in Guatemala, never went beyond second grade in school and now lives with his wife, 2- and 4-year-old children and four others in a two-bedroom apartment.

“It’s better for them here, more opportunities. In my country, there are no opportunities. I want them to get a good education,” he said.

Tight-knit community

Through soccer teams and networks of friends, a tight-knit community has formed in Lake Elsinore, Velasquez said. When he runs out of money because of lack of work, friends help tide him over. He returns the favor when his earnings rise.

Velasquez lives in a section of Lake Elsinore that has the Inland area’s biggest concentration of people of Guatemalan ancestry. A census tract that borders the north shore of the lake has 502 Guatemalans, 9 percent of the neighborhood’s residents.

At Mexican-immigrant-owned Los Compadres supermarket in downtown Lake Elsinore, most customers now are from Guatemala and the store carries a growing array of Guatemalan products, said manager Alejandra Zuniga.

Most Guatemalan immigrants are from rural areas and several said they like the slow pace of life in places like Lake Elsinore.

Many, though, like to occasionally visit heavily Guatemalan neighborhoods west of downtown Los Angeles, which by far has the largest Guatemalan population in the country.

Natividad Arias, 43, her husband Marco, 47, and their three adult children enjoy relaxing in a Los Angeles park with other immigrants and eating at Guatemalan restaurants.

“I feel like I’m in Guatemala,” the San Bernardino woman said in Spanish. “If we meet people and get along well, we exchange phone numbers.”

Even though the family prefers the quieter Inland area to Los Angeles, they have had to adjust to the Mexican culture that surrounds them in San Bernardino. With far more Mexican than Guatemalan immigrants in the city, most of the friends the five have made have been Mexican.

Hector Ortega, 22, who arrived in San Bernardino a year ago, hasn’t gotten used to Mexican food.

“They put chili in all their food and, whew,” Hector Ortega said in Spanish with a laugh as he waved his hand up and down in front of his mouth.

The family also had to get accustomed to Mexican mannerisms.

Guatemalans, who tend to be more reserved and formal than Mexicans, aren’t used to people they have just met slapping them on the back and calling them güey, or dude.

The Arias family shares a cramped one-bedroom apartment. The couple’s two sons and daughter sleep on three beds pushed against each other in the living room.

Yet it’s luxury compared to Guatemala, where a mattress, bicycle and even shoes were an unattainable dream, said Natividad Arias, who slept on a straw mat and wore only sandals until she moved to California.

AN LA OFFSHOOT

The Inland area became a growing destination for Guatemalan immigrants because of the region’s proximity to Los Angeles, said Todd Sorensen, an assistant professor of economics at UC Riverside and an expert on migration patterns.

Cheaper housing is one reason Guatemalans settle in the Inland area, and jobs may be why there was a much bigger increase in Guatemalans between 2000 and 2010 than during the previous decade, Sorensen said.

In the 2000s, the Inland Guatemalan population expanded at more than twice the rate as Los Angeles’, the census shows.

With most Guatemalans in the Inland area recently arrived, groups in Los Angeles are just starting to organize in the region.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles office of the Guatemalan Peace and Development Network — which advocates for Guatemalan immigrants — put together what are believed to be the first Guatemalan community forums in the region, one in Riverside and the other in San Bernardino. They were focused on immigration law, but Azalea Ryckman of the network said the group plans to do Inland organizing on a number of issues.

In the absence of Inland-based groups, churches like San Bernardino’s Shekinah Ministries function as de facto community organizations that bring immigrants together. The church provides college scholarships and directs congregants to services, said the Rev. Miguelangel Godinez Velasquez, pastor of the majority-Guatemalan evangelical congregation.

Bakery a draw

Tikal Bakery in downtown Riverside — one of the only Guatemalan-owned businesses in the Inland area — also is a community gathering point, said co-owner Milvia Mancilla.

Guatemalan immigrants come to the store, which also has a small restaurant and grocery area, from as far away as Beaumont, Palm Springs and Big Bear, she said. The couple also owns a bakery in Fontana.

Mancilla, 59, spends much of her day chatting with customers as she rings up purchases of Guatemalan rice-flour bread, banana-leaf-wrapped tamales and jars of date palm in brine.

“They’re like family to me and I help them out with their problems,” Kaufman said.

The Mancillas ended up in the Riverside area because Amilcar Mancilla’s brother in Ontario worked with a Mexican man who recommended an apartment complex in Rubidoux where mostly Mexican immigrants lived. Three years later, the couple moved to Riverside.

Many immigrants make plans — some realized, some not — to return to their homelands when they’re older.

Milvia Mancilla said she will spend her retirement in Riverside and work at the bakery as long as she can.

“Here I’m never by myself,” she said as a friend sat sipping juice at a wooden table in the bakery. “I’m always chatting with someone. I give advice, talk with people about God, sometimes sit down to eat with my customers. This is my home.”